Andoni Iraola refuses to measure Florian Wirtz by the cold glare of a numbers column. Not yet, and maybe not ever.
The Liverpool manager watched the £116m Germany international pull Atlético Madrid around Anfield in midweek and saw exactly what he wanted: control, invention, courage on the ball. The fact Wirtz’s Premier League record still reads no goals, one assist? For Iraola, that is background noise.
“Flo played very well against Atlético Madrid and I also think he has been unlucky,” Iraola said, pointing back to the disallowed strike at Nottingham Forest that briefly stood before VAR cut short the celebration. That moment, plus a handful of chances his teammates failed to finish, has helped fuel a narrative that the 23-year-old is losing the ball too often and not delivering enough end product.
Iraola is having none of it.
In an era when forwards live and die by their spreadsheets, he is doubling down on the old-fashioned idea of the team’s rhythm being worth more than an isolated stat line. “Whether a striker scores a lot of goals or he doesn’t, you have to look at the performances,” he argued. “Does he help us to play well? Yes. Well, someone will score the goals and someone will give the assists. I am not too focused on numbers.”
This is the crux of his defence. Wirtz, operating at the heart of a remodelled attack, is being asked to knit things together, not simply lurk for tap-ins. Against Atlético he slipped a superb pass into Bradley Barcola’s path, carving open Diego Simeone’s defence with the kind of weighted ball that doesn’t show up as a goal, but shifts a contest.
The pressure, though, is obvious. A nine-figure fee, the tag of Champions League standout from last season, and a new league where every turnover is replayed and dissected. Wirtz has been criticised for conceding possession too often, a charge Iraola accepts only in the context of a player taking risks in tight spaces for the sake of the team’s attacking structure.
“Nowadays everything is about numbers, everyone tells players you have to assist, you have to score goals,” he said. “For me, you have to help us play well. Someone will score the goals and I don’t care if it is the midfielders like it was the other day. Someone will score the goals if we are doing well collectively.”
That “someone” is still being worked out. The front line around Wirtz has shifted, and with it the patterns he must learn almost on the run. Barcola, the France international, is still only two games into his Liverpool career. Victor Muñoz, another new arrival, is also feeling his way into the Premier League.
“There is an argument to make that the wingers have changed more than anywhere else,” Iraola admitted. The flanks have been ripped up and rewritten, and Wirtz has become the constant, the player expected to understand not just his own role but everyone else’s.
Now the Spaniard sees new possibilities. “Now we have new weapons we can use with Bradley and Victor. With Florian, he is key for us,” he said. The message is clear: Liverpool’s attacking evolution will run through the German’s boots.
Iraola is betting that familiarity will sharpen Wirtz’s influence. The more minutes he shares with Barcola and Muñoz, the more those half-spaces and blind-side runs will be hit in stride rather than just spotted a fraction too late. Even now, the Liverpool manager senses the chemistry starting to form.
“I am not worried because he will quickly learn where Victor prefers the ball or where Bradley prefers the ball,” he said. “And, also, Bradley in just his second game you could see they already had a good association. I am not very worried.”
The numbers will come or they won’t. Iraola’s stance is that Liverpool’s attack will be judged on its collective menace, not on whether its most gifted creator tops the charts. For Wirtz, the real verdict will be written not in statistics, but in how far this new-look forward line can carry Liverpool this season.
